Attitudes towards crime fiction/murder mystery genre on five Swedish Libraries : a qualitative interview study

This master’s thesis falls under the topic of sociology in literature. The purpose is to examine what kind of attitudes that a few Swedish librarians may have to the crime fiction/murder mystery genre. The aim of this paper is also to find out if those attitudes have changed through during their working time, and if so, how they have changed. This paper is going to raise the following issues; What attitudes do librarians have to the detective genre and how has these attitudes possibly changed through the years? What does the librarian consider regarding the names that the crime fiction may have? What is the librarian's attitude to the detective genre trends and popularity, and has this changed from a backward-looking perspective?The theory of thesis is based Jofrid Karner Smidts theory about the characteristics of the librarian’s literary taste and the role of the librarian as a mediator of literature. The main method used in this thesis is qualitative interviews. In total, six librarians from five different public access libraries have been interviewed, with questions based on the devised thesis problem. All of the librarians who were interviewed had a positive attitude to the crime fiction/murder mystery genre in question. All the libraries had a special crime fiction shelf to promote the genre. The trends of the crime fiction genre are tilted towards female writers, with a growing trend in descriptive violence